Only authorized happy time Digesters are permitted in the vaults. Walther thanked her glumly. His spirits were so depressed that not even the digested version of the Bible shocked him too greatly. The Old Testament amounted to eleven pages, in rather large type; the Gospel of St. Mark was three paragraphs; the Acts of the Apostles spanned less than half a page. Walther left the library, and the icy wind roused him from depression. It lashed him to anger, to a desperate, unreasoning anger that drove him to find, somewhere on Earth, an ember of the old culture. Somewhere he had to find such an ember and bring it back to Neustadt, where it would flame again. He managed to get directions to the Vienna stratowaycar. Surely in Vienna he would find some trace of the spirit left by Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Strauss. Ten minutes later, when he left the stratoway in the Platz terminal near the Vienna Ring, his heart beat a little faster. This was indeed the old Vienna, as he had envisaged it from the few pictures he had seen and the many stories he had been told. The buildings on the Ring were in good repair, and not substantially altered. There was the Burg Theatre, the Art and History Museum, the buttressed facade of the ancient Opera House, the soaring twin spires of the Votive Church. It was like seeing an old woodcut come to life. But, for Walther, that was all that came to life in Vienna. The Burg Theatre was currently presenting Faust, in what was billed as a brilliant new production scaled down to seventeen minutes. Walther sadly recalled Goethe's prophetic line: _Mein Lied ertont der unbekaten Menge_.... My song sounds to the unknown multitude. Wandering outside the city itself, into the footpaths of the Wienerwald, Walther tried to lose himself among the gentle slopes and the old trees that cut latticework into the sky. He came suddenly upon the village of Tullnerzing, where, from a tiny sidewalk cafe, music of a stringed ensemble came in short, quick bursts. It was scherzo speeded up a hundredfold, with not three but an infinite number of quarter notes blurred into what sounded like a single beat. These were the Vienna woods! How could he ever tell his mother and father? Heartsick, he returned to the Platz and found the Berlin stratoway. In Berlin, his bitterness grew. He had known the Unter den Linden must have changed through the centuries, but he was not prepared for such a pace of life, such a frenzy of leisure. Better not to have left Andromeda. Better always to have lived with a dream. The sight of two elderly burghers drinking beer reminded him of his own great grandfather, and gave him a heartening twinge of nostalgia. But as he stepped close to their table, he saw that as they sipped from their miniature steins the fingers of their free hands beat out a rhythmic accompaniment to the convolutions of an adagio team imaged on the table-top television screen.